Functional Styles and Types of Writing in Modern English

Part I. State exam aspects

1.1. Introduction
(государственный образовательный стандарт
специальности 021700 – филология)

Государственный междисциплинарный экзамен по специальности «филология», основным требованием которого является проверка выполнения государственных требований к уровню и содержанию подготовки филолога, предполагает:

- владение основным изучаемым языком в его литературной форме (иметь представление о его диалектном разнообразии);

- знание родственных связей языка и его типологических соотно­шений с другими языками, его истории, его современного состоя­ния и тенденций развития;

- умение анализировать язык в его истории и современном со­стоя­нии, пользуясь системой основных понятий и терминов общего языкознания, ориентироваться в основных этапах истории науки о языке и дискуссионных вопросах современного языко­знания;

- умение анализировать литературу и фольклор в их историческом раз­витии и современном состоянии, в сопряжении с гражданской ис­торией и историей культуры народа, говорящего на данном языке;

- понимание закономерностей литературного процесса, художест­вен­ное значение литературного произведения в связи с общест­венной ситуацией и культурой эпохи; определять художественное свое­обра­зие произведений и творчества писателя в целом;

- умение определить и оценить типологические особенности текстов разной жанровой и функциональной типологии;

- владение основными методами лингвистического и литературо­ведческого анализа;

- умение пользоваться научной, справочной, методической лите­ра­турой на родном и иностранном языках;

- умение переводить тексты по специальности с иностранного языка на родной и с родного на иностранный, а также редактировать дан­ные тексты; владение методикой перевода и реферирования текста;

- владение навыками компьютерной обработки данных; владение методами информационного поиска (в том числе в Интернет);

- владение статическими методами обработки филологической ин­фор­мации, умение работать с различными типами текстовых редакторов;

- обладание данными об истории и современном состоянии и пер­спек­тивах избранной специальности.

Государственный междисциплинарный экзамен по специаль­ности «филология» включает три раздела:

1) филологический анализ текста;

2) комментарий лингвистических явлений;

3) теоретический вопрос по теоретическим дисципли­нам спе­циальности – история английского языка, теоретическая грамма­тика, теоретическая фонетика, лексикология, теория перевода, стилис­тика, общее языкознание, методика обучения английскому языку.

Филологический анализ текста предполагает анализ текс­тов разной типологии и жанров: художественный, публицис­тический, научный, политический. При этом текст опреде­ляется как словесное речевое произведение, в котором реализуются все языковые единицы (от фонемы до предложения), это сложный языковой знак, следо­вательно, текст как объект филологического анализа может и должен включать данные его лингвистического анализа. Текст создается ради того, чтобы объективировать мысль автора, воплотить его творческий замысел, передать знания и представления о человеке и мире, вынести эти представления за пределы авторского сознания и сделать их достоянием других людей. Текст не автономен и не самодостаточен – он основной, но не единственный компонент текстовой (речемысли­тельной) дея­тель­ности. Важнейшими составляющими ее структуры, помимо текста, являются автор (адресант текста), читатель (адресат), сама отображаемая действительность, знания о которой переда­ются в тексте, и языковая система, из которой автор выбирает языковые средства, позволяющие ему адекватно воплотить свой творческий замысел.

Выделяются 4 основных подхода к изучению текста:

1) лингвоцентрический (аспект соотнесенности «язык – текст»);

2) текстоцентрический (текст как автономное структурно-смыс­ло­вое целое вне соотнесенности с участниками литера­турной комму­никации);

3) антропоцентрический (аспект соотнесенности «автор –
текст – читатель»);

4) когнитивный (аспект соотнесенности «автор-текст-вне­тек­сто­вая деятельность»).

Логика лингвоцентрического подхода основана на изучении функционирования языковых единиц и категорий в условиях худо­жественного текста. Это то, чем занимается традиционная стилистика, стилистика языковых единиц, эстетика слова. Предметом рассмот­ре­ния при таком подходе являются как лексические, так и фонети­чес­кие, грамматические, стилистические единицы и категории. Например, встречающиеся в художествен­ном тексте прилагательные цвета, гла­голы речи, безличные предло­жения, парцел­лированные конструк­ции, видовременные значения глагола и многое другое. Такого рода анализ выявляет функцио­нальные свойства тех или иных единиц, описывает особенности идиостиля определенного писателя или поэта. Но с пози­ций лингвис­тики текста подобный подход не позволяет в полной мере вскрыть текстовые функции рассматриваемых единиц, их роль в структуре и семантике текста.

Текстоцентрический подход основан на представлении о тексте как результате и продукте творческой деятельности как уникальном речевом произведении, отмеченным набором соб­ствен­ных текстовых категорий и свойств. Текст рассматри­вается как целостный завер­шен­ный объект исследования. При этом в зависимости от предмета рассмотрения в качестве самостоя­тельных направлений изучения текста выделяются: семантика и грамматика (или отдельно синтаксис) текста, основу которых составляет взгляд на текст как на структурно-семантическое целое.

Экстралингвистические параметры текста. Любой текст, в том числе и художественный, являясь, с одной стороны, самодостаточным объектом, объектом материальной культуры, с другой стороны, связан нерасторжимыми узами с личностью его создателя, со временем и местом написания, с конкретной ситуацией, вызвавшей то или иное художественное произве­дение. Одним из важнейших параметров этого рода является обусловленность содержания текста самой дей­стви­тельностью и отраженность в тексте действительности, времени его напи­сания, национально-культурных представлений, особенностей пси­­хо­ло­гии личности и творческого поведения автора произве­дения, особенностей его творческой и жизненной судьбы, связи его произ­ведения с различными религиозными и философскими пред­ставле­ниями, принадлежности тому или иному литератур­ному направ­лению, школе в искусстве и т.д. Именно этот пара­метр обусловливает индивидуально авторские особенности текста, их речевую органи­зацию и речевую системность, с одной стороны. С другой стороны, он также обусловливает и особенности читатель­ского восприятия текста.

Литературное произведение распространяется за пределы текста. Оно воспринимается на фоне реальности и в связи с ней. Город и природа, исторические события и реалии быта – все это входит в произведение, без которых оно не может быть правильно воспринято. Реальность – как бы комментарий к произведению, его объяснение.

Изучение художественного текста как феномена культуры ока­залось плодотворным для выявления собственно текстовых свойств, к которым можно отнести категории интертекс­туаль­ности, языковой текстовой личности, прецедентных текстов.

Принадлежность текста к определенному стилю и его жан­ровая оформленность – существенный параметр любого текста. Особенно важ­но, когда сам автор определяет жанр своего произведения, настраи­вая читателя на восприятие текстовой информации в опре­деленном жанровом регистре.

Своеобразие лингвистического подхода к исследованию структур­ной организации художественного текста обнаружи­вается на поня­тийно-категориальном уровне: предметом рассмо­трения явля­ются кате­­гории членимости и связности, макси­мально сопрягаемые с внеш­ней стороной литературного текста, его линейной организацией.

Многослойность текста отражается в наборе внутритексто­вых связей, их гибкой системе, которые соответствуют основ­ным уровням текста: семантическому, лексико-граммати­ческо­му, образному, праг­ма­тическому.

Творческий замысел автора произведения, характер отобра­жаемой действительности, индивидуально-авторские мировоз­зренческие уста­новки, особенности художественного мышления автора текста, а так­же осознанное или неосознанное отношение к языку, его потенциалу, нормам определяют принци­пы отбора языковых единиц и органи­зации речевой структуры литератур­но-художественного произ­ве­дения. Упо­треб­ление языковых средств в тексте – фонетических, грамма­ти­ческих (морфоло­гических и синтаксических), лексических – пол­ностью зави­сит от воли автора, его индивидуального стиля. В связи с этим в процессе анализа текста необходимо охарактеризовать исполь­зуемые в тексте приемы актуализации смысла, своеобразие выбора лексических единиц и используемых лексических категорий, частот­ность повто­ряющихся синтаксических струк­тур, особенности порядка слов, использование в тексте образ­ных средств и стилис­тических приемов.

Literary Genres

Below are some definitions for the terms genre and literary genre.

· genre n 1: a kind of literary or artistic work 2: a style of expres­sing yourself in writing [syn: writing style, literary genre] 3: a class of artistic endeavor having a characteristic form or technique. Dictionary.com

· literary genre n: a style of expressing yourself in writing [syn: writing style, genre] Dictionary.com

· A literary genre is one of the divisions of literature into genres according to particular criteria such as literary technique, tone, or subject matter (content). ErWiki, free encyclopedia.

So what do we mean when we talk about literary genres? Dividing literary works into genres is a way of classifying them into particular categories. At the highest level literature is classified as either Fiction (about things, events and characters which are not true) or Nonfiction (about things, events and people which are based on fact).

We then classify Fiction into categories that tell us something about the form of the work. For example:

· poetry

· drama (plays)

· prose (ordinary writing)

We also classify Fiction according to technique (layout) and style. For example, we have:

· picture books (contains words and pictures)

· game books (require the reader to problem-solve and actively engage in an activity while reading)

· novellas (short novels)

· short stories (much shorter than a novella)

· novels

We also have books that are classified by content and theme. For example:

· adventure stories · science fiction · fantasy · crime and mystery · thriller · western · travel literature · spy fiction · political thriller

· horror · romance · human relations · historical fiction · psychological fiction · erotic fiction · family saga · fable · fairy tale

These categories aren't always clear-cut. You can have a crime/mys­te­ry story set in the future (science fiction) or in the past (historical fiction).

Newspaper Style

Basically servesthe purpose of informing and instructing the reader, and partially rendering evaluation. Newspaper genres: editorial (leading article), newsreel, brief news report, reportage, interview, essay, title, topical satire, advertisement.

Brief news items provide explicit information, low level or zero eva­luation. They have complicated syntactical constructions, deve­loped system of clauses, the abundance of non-finite forms. The language is characterized by clichés, trite metaphors, expressive means, fixed word-combinations. They are overloaded with special political and economic terms, non-term political vocabulary, abbreviations, neolo­gisms. They can consist of 1-3 paragraphs of classical structure:

· an introductory sentence

· the development of the idea

· a summarizing sentence.

Headlines of brief news items are very informative. They tend to omit articles, auxiliary verbs, demonstrative pronouns. Neutral, neutral-colloquial and neutral-literary vocabulary is mainly used in them. The functional purpose is to draw the reader’s attention and to inform him.

Editorials tend to evaluate events, they tend to express the point of view. They are longer, contain a greater number of paragraphs, but they have the same fixed structure.

Advertisements and announcements are highly evaluative, not very informative. The texts are not very long. They render the information about the object and ascribe positive evaluation to the goods advertised. Of all newspaper texts announcements exhibit the use of a greater number of trite means of speech imagery.

Headlines. Their function is to inform the reader briefly of what the news that follows is about. The main features of headlines are omitted articles, phrases with verbals, full declarative sentences, interrogative sentences, nominative sentences, elliptical sentences, questions in the form of statements. English headlines are short and catchy. They may contain emotionally colored words, often resort to a deliberate breaking-up of set expressions (Cakes and bitter ale). The pun and alliteration are very common in headlines.

Language Means of the publicist style are the following.

Graphic Means: a wide use of graphic means – the change of prints, word-arts, italics, various graphic symbols (asterisks, etc.) used for the sake of text limitation as well as elements of compositional arrangement such as columns, titles, subtitles, parts and paragraphs.

Phonetic means: rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, onomaetopia; allite­ra­tion renders negative evaluation.

Vocabulary means: the priority of neutral and bookish vocabulary; a wide use of language means to actualize the chronotop (proper and geogra­phi­cal names, the abundance of statistics, toponymic and proper names, facts and data); means of evaluation; neologisms, social political termino­logy; a great number of loan-words and international words; the use of words and word-combinations typical of other styles (especially, conversational) against the general back­ground of the bookish style vocabulary, including terminology as well as means of imagery to increase expressiveness (trite metaphors, meto­nymies, personifi­ca­tion, metaphorical paraphrases, a metapho­ri­cal use of terminology); newspaper terms: newspaper vocabulary and cliches (journalese and bookish), the decomposition of phraseological units. Word-building: loan suffixes and prefixes as well as the combination of words.

Grammatical means: in morphology the use of the singular number of nouns in their collective meaning, the plural number for the definition of generalization, a wide use of the superlative degree of adjectives in order to reveal the expressiveness, substantiation and evaluation of the use of numerals, adjectives and participles. The average sentence length is 9-11words. A wide use of declarative sentences. The use of ques­tions, exclamatory sentences for the sake of expressiveness. Means of expressive syntax: inversions, parallelism, antithesis, parcellation, gradation, isolation, different types of the author's words presentation and conversational constructions, different patterns in the use of homogeneous parts of the sentence – double, three-element and multi-element.

Compositional and textual means: canonized three-part structure of publicist texts, the principle of “pyramid” and its effects in the composition of modern newspaper text, the use of compositional (foregrounding) devices.

Contents and Authors

Aldington, R.	Asimov, I.
Ballard, J.G.	Bradbury, R.D.
Christie, A.	Cronin, A.J.
Galsworthy, J.	Golding, W.
Greene, G.	Hailey, A.
Hewitt, K.	Lawrence, D.H.
Maugham, W.S.	Mikes, G.
O.Henry	Saroyan, W.
Twain, M.	Warren, R.P.

ISAAC ASIMOV (1920-1992)

American author and biochemist, a highly successful and prolific writer of science fiction and of science books for the layperson. He published about 500 volumes.

Asimov was brought to the United States at the age of three. He grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., graduating from Columbia University in 1939 and taking a Ph.D. there in 1948. He then joined the faculty of Boston University, with which he remained associated thereafter.

Asimov began contributing stories to science-fiction magazines in 1939 and in 1950 published his first book, Pebble in the Sky. His trilogy of novels, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation (1951-53), which recounts the collapse and rebirth of a vast interstellar empire in the universe of the future, is his most famous work of science fiction. In the short-story collection I, Robot (1950), he developed a set of ethics for robots and intelligent machines that greatly influenced other writers' treatment of the subject. His other novels and collections of stories included The Stars, like Dust (1951), The Currents of Space (1952), The Caves of Steel (1954), The Naked Sun (1957), Earth Is Room Enough (1957), Foundation's Edge (1982), and The Robots of Dawn (1983). His " Nightfall " (1941) is thought by many to be the finest science-fiction short story ever written. Among Asimov's books on various topics in science, written with lucidity and humour, are The Chemicals of Life (1954), Inside the Atom (1956), The World of Nitrogen (1958), Life and Energy (1962), The Human Brain (1964), The Neutrino (1966), Science, Numbers and I (1968), Our World in Space (1974), and Views of the Universe (1981). He also published two volumes of autobiography.

AGATHA CHRISTIE (1891-1976)

English detective novelist and playwright whose books have sold more than 100,000,000 copies.

Educated at home by her mother, she began writing detective fiction while working as a nurse during World War I. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduced Hercule Poirot, her eccentric and egotistic Belgian detective, who reappeared in about 25 novels and many shorter stories before returning to Styles, where in Curtain (1975) he died. The elderly spinster Miss Jane Marple, her other principal detective figure, first appeared in Murder at the Vicarage (1930). Christie's first major recognition came with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which was followed by some 75 novels that usually made best-seller lists and were serialized in popular magazines in England and the United States. Her plays include The Mousetrap (1952), which set a world record for the longest continuous run at one theatre (8,862 performances – more than 21 years – at the Ambassadors Theatre, London) and then moved to another theatre; and Witness for the Prosecution (1953), which, like many of her works, was adapted into a very successful film (1958). Other notable film adaptations include Murder on the Orient Express (1934; 1974) and Death on the Nile (1937; 1978).

Agatha Christie domesticated murder perhaps no other author had done before or since and transformed it into nothing more perilous than an intrigue game of chess or a satisfactory crossword puzzle. All her life she abhorred violence and blood and constantly confessed that she had no knowledge of the usual implements used for murder. "I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides poisons are neat and clean and really exciting... I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse."

Her first marriage, to Colonel Archibald Christie, ended in divorce in 1928. After her marriage in 1930 to the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, she spent several months each year on expeditions in Iraq and Syria with him. She also wrote romantic, nondetective novels, such as Absent in the Spring (1944), under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Her Autobiography (1977) appeared posthumously. She was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1971.

JOHN GALSWORTHY (1867-1933)

English novelist and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932. Notable works include The Forsyte Saga (1906 – 1921) and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter.

Galsworthy's family, of Devonshire farming stock traceable to the 16th century, had made a comfortable fortune in property in the 19th century. Educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford, Galsworthy was called to the bar in 1890. Galsworthy found law uncongenial and took to writing. For his first works, From the Four Winds (1897), a collection of short stories, and the novel Jocelyn (1898), both published at his own expense, he used the pseudonym John Sinjohn. The Island Pharisees (1904) was the first book to appear under his own name. The Man of Property (1906) began the novel sequence to be known as The Forsyte Saga, the long chronicle novel by which Galsworthy is chiefly remembered; others in the same series are " Indian Summer of a Forsyte " (1918, in Five Tales), In Chancery (1920), Awakening (1920), and To Let (1921). The story of the For­syte family after World War I was continued in The White Monkey (1924), The Silver Spoon (1926), and Swan Song (1928), collected in A Modern Comedy (1929). Galsworthy's other novels include The Country House (1907), The Patrician (1911), and The Freelands (1915).

He is now far better known particularly for The Forsyte Saga, the first of three trilogies of novels about the eponymous family and connected lives. These books, as with many of his other works, dealt with class, and in particular upper-middle class lives. Although sympathetic to his characters he highlights their insular, snobbish and acquisitive attitudes and their suffocating moral codes. He is viewed as one of the first writers of the Edwardian era; challenging in his works some of the ideals of society depicted in the proceeding literature of Victorian England. The depiction of a woman in an unhappy marriage furnishes another recurring theme in his work. The character of Irene in The Forsyte Saga is drawn from Ada Pearson even though her previous marriage was not as miserable as Irene's.

His work is often less convincing when it deals with the changing face of wider British society and how it affects people of the lower social classes. Through his writings he campaigned for a variety of causes including prison reform, women's rights, animal welfare and censorship, but these have limited appeal outside the era in which they were written.

Galsworthy was also a successful dramatist, his plays, written in a naturalistic style, usually examining some controversial ethical or social problem. They include The Silver Box (1906), which, like many of his other works, has a legal theme and depicts a bitter contrast of the law's treatment of the rich and the poor; Strife (1909), a study of industrial relations; Justice (1910), a realistic portrayal of prison life that roused so much feeling that it led to reform; and Loyalties (1922), the best of his later plays. He also wrote verse.

A television serial of The Forsyte Saga by the British Broadcasting Corporation achieved immense popularity in Great Britain in 1967 and later in many other nations, especially the United States, reviving interest in an author whose reputation had plummeted after his death.

WILLIAM GOLDING (1911-1993)

English novelist who in 1983 won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his parables of the human condition. He attracted a cult of followers, especially among the youth of the post-World War II generation.

Educated at Marlborough Grammar School, where his father taught, and at Brasenose College, Oxford, Golding graduated in 1935. After working in a settlement house and in small theatre companies, he became a schoolmaster at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury. He joined the Royal Navy in 1940, took part in the action that saw the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck, and commanded a rocket-launching craft during the invasion of France in 1944. After the war he resumed teaching at Bishop Wordsworth's until 1961.

Golding's often allegorical fiction makes broad use of allusions to classical literature, mythology, and Christian symbolism. No distinct thread unites his novels, and the subject matter and technique vary. Golding's first published novel was Lord of the Flies (1954; film 1963 and 1990), the story of a group of schoolboys isolated on a coral island who revert to savagery. Thus the novel dealt with an unsuccessful struggle against barbarism and war, thus showing the ambiguity and fragility of civilization. Its imaginative and brutal depiction of the rapid and inevitable dissolution of social mores aroused widespread interest. The Inheritors (1955), set in the last days of Neanderthal man, is another story of the essential violence and depravity of human nature. The inheritors looked back into prehis­tory, advancing the thesis that humankind's evolutionary ancestors, "the new people," (generally identified with homo sapiens) triumphed over a gentler race (generally identified with Neanderthals) as much by violence and deceit as by natural superiority. The guilt-filled reflections of a naval officer, his ship torpedoed, who faces an agonizing death are the subject of Pincher Martin (1956). Two other novels, Free Fall (1959) and The Spire (1964), also demonstrate Golding's belief that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey." Darkness Visible (1979) tells the story of a boy horribly burned in the London blitz during World War II. His later works include Rites of Passage (1980), which won the Booker McConnell Prize, and its sequels, Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989). Golding was knighted in 1988.

ARTHUR HAILEY (1920-2004)

British/Canadian/American/Bahamian novelist.

Born in Luton, Bedfordshire, England, Hailey served in the Royal Air Force from the start of World War II in 1939 until 1947, when he went to live in Canada. After working at a number of jobs and writing part-time, he became a full-time writer in 1956, encouraged by the success of the CBC television drama, Flight into Danger (in print as Runway Zero Eight). Following the success of Hotel in 1965, he moved to California; in 1969, he moved to the Bahamas.

Each of his novels has a different industrial or commercial setting and includes, in addition to dramatic human conflict, carefully researched information about the way that particular environments and systems function and how these affect society and its inhabitants.

Critics often dismissed Hailey's success as the result of a formulaic style in which he centered a crisis on an ordinary character, then inflated the suspense by hopping among multiple related plotlines. However, he was so popular with readers that his books were guaranteed to become best-sellers.

He would spend about one year researching a subject, followed by six months reviewing his notes and, finally, about 18 months writing the book. That aggressive research — tracking rebel guerrillas in the Peruvian jungle at age 67 for The Evening News (1990), or reading 27 books on the hotel industry for Hotel – gave his novels a realism that appealed to readers, even as some critics complained that he used it to mask a lack of literary talent.

Many of his books have reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and more than 170 million copies have been sold worldwide in 40 languages. Many have been made into movies and Hotel was made into a long-running television series. Airport became a blockbuster movie with stunning visual effects.

KAREN HEWITT

Karen Hewitt (The Oxford University Institute for Slavonic Studies) is a literary critic, a specialist in study of culture an honorary professor at Perm University. She is the author of the well-known and highly appreciated book Understanding Britain published in Great Britain as well as in Russia. This book is a personal account of Britain and of British life specially written for the Russian reader. The author tried to answer some of the questions put to her by readers about the differences between British society and “Russian- in-Transition”. Karen Hewitt published several books, among them: Understanding English Literature, Contemporary British Stories (introduction and commentary).

GEORGE MIKES (1912-1987)

George Mikes was a Hungarian-born British author most famous for his commentaries on various countries. How to be an Alien poked gentle fun at the English, including a one-line chapter on sex: "Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles." Subsequent books dealt with (among others) Japan (The Land of the Rising Yen), Israel (Milk and Honey, The Prophet Motive), the USA (How to Scrape Skies), and the United Nations (How to Unite Nations), Australia (Boomerang), and the British again (How to be Inimitable, How to be Decadent), and South America (How to Tango). Other subjects include God (How to be God), his cat (Tsi-Tsa 1978) and wealth (How to be poor 1983).

Mikes narrated a BBC television report of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

O. HENRY (1862-1910)

Рseudonym of WILLIAM SYDNEY PORTER, U.S. short-story writer whose tales romanticized the commonplace – in particular the life of ordinary people in New York City. His stories expressed the effect of coincidence on character through humour, grim or ironic, and often had surprise endings, a device that became identified with his name and cost him critical favour when its vogue had passed.

Porter attended a school taught by his aunt, then clerked in his uncle's drugstore. In 1882 he went to Texas, where he worked on a ranch, in a general land office, and later as teller in the First National Bank in Austin. He began writing sketches at about the time of his marriage to Athol Estes in 1887, and in 1894 he started a humorous weekly, The Rolling Stone. When that venture failed, Porter joined the Houston Post as reporter, columnist, and occasional cartoonist.

In February 1896 he was indicted for embezzlement of bank funds. Friends aided his flight to Honduras. News of his wife's fatal illness, however, brought him back to Austin, and lenient authorities did not press his case until after her death. When convicted, Porter received the lightest sentence possible and in 1898 he entered the penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio; his sentence was shortened to three years and three months for good behavior. As night druggist in the prison hospital, he could write to earn money for support of his daughter Margaret. His stories of adventure in the southwest U.S. and Central America were immediately popular with magazine readers, and when he emerged from prison W.S. Porter had become O. Henry.

In 1902 O. Henry arrived in New York – his “Bagdad on the Subway”. From December 1903 to January 1906 he produced a story a week for the New York World, writing also for magazines. His first book, Cabbages and Kings (1904), depicted fantastic characters against exotic Honduran backgrounds. Both The Four Million (1906) and The Trimmed Lamp (1907) explored the lives of the multitude of New York in their daily routines and searchings for romance and adventure. Heart of the West (1907) presented accurate and fasci­nating tales of the Texas range.

Then in rapid succession came The Voice of the City (1908), The Gentle Grafter (1908), Roads of Destiny (1909), Options (1909), Strictly Business (1910), and Whirligigs (1910). Whirligigs contains perhaps Porter's funniest story The Ransom of Red Chief.

Despite his popularity, O. Henry's final years were marred by ill-health, a desperate financial struggle, and alcoholism. A second marriage in 1907 was unhappy. After his death three more collected volumes appeared: Sixes and Sevens (1911), Rolling Stones (1912), and Waifs and Strays (1917). Later, seven fugitive stories and poems, O. Henryana (1920), Letters to Lithopolis (1922) and two collections of his early work on the Houston Post, Postscripts (1923), and O.Henry Encore (1939), were published. Foreign translations and adaptations for other art forms, including films and television, attest his universal application and appeal. Gerald Langford's biography, Alias O.Henry, was published in 1957.

WILLIAM SAROYAN (1908-1981)

American author whose impressionistic stories and sketches celebrated the joy of living in spite of poverty and insecurity during the Great Depression (who made his initial impact during the Depres­sion with a deluge of brash, original, and irreverent stories celebrating the joy of living in spite of poverty, hunger, and insecurity). Several of Saroyan's works were autobiographical. He found his strongest themes in the rootlessness of the immigrant, he praised freedom, and declared kindness and brotherly love as human ideals.

Saroyan was concerned with the basic goodness of all people, especially the obscure and naive, and the value of life. His mastery of the vernacular makes his characters vibrantly alive. Most of his stories are based on his childhood and family, notably the collection My Name Is Aram (1940) and the novel The Human Comedy (1943). His novels, such as Rock Wagram (1951) and The Laughing Matter (1953), were inspired by his own experiences of marriage, father­hood, and divorce.

Saroyan's works are highly democratic, they are marked by deep belief in human kindness and the power of humour. To him the kind heart and humour are instruments of stoicism, helping people in overcoming hardships and in resisting evil.

Saroyan's characters are mostly common people, poor, noble, and full of humour. He is at his best, however, with characters of children and such grown-ups who remain children, preserving their naivety, sin­cerity and sensitivity. No wonder that his manner of writing is charac­terized by the sincerity of intonation and spontaneity of presentation. His language is both lucid and colourful. Saroyan makes the reader see the world through the eyes of his characters, keeping himself in the background, though never aloof. His humour is mostly mild, some­times bitter, and more often than not eccentric.

Realistic and democratic at bottom, Saroyan's works are not de­void of drawbacks and certain limitations. His firm belief in human kindness makes him repel the seamy side of life, its violence and cruelty. Though being a realist, he can't help exposing it from time to time. But that is always accompanied by the soothing tone and reassuring smile suggesting that in spite of the hardships life will change for the better. Thus his kindness borders on sentimentality.

Saroyan is often compared to O. Henry, whom he admired, and whose books he edited and commented upon. Indeed, sentimental turns, happy endings, love for common people and eccentricity unite the writers. Nevertheless, there were some other influences, Sher­wood Andersen's cannot be neglected, who helped many an American writer find his way in literature, the great Hemingway including.

Saroyan worked tirelessly to perfect a prose style, that was swift and seemingly spontaneous, blended with his own ebullient spirit, which became known as 'Saroyanesque.' As a playwright Saroyan's work was drawn from deeply personal sources, depicting the bitter-sweet loneliness of the foreign born American. He disregarded the conventional idea of conflict as essential to drama to create a theater of mood.

MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

Рseudonym of SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS, American humorist, writer, and lecturer who won a worldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

It was in Virginia City on Feb. 3, 1863, that "Mark Twain" was born when Clemens, then 27, signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym. The new name was a riverman's term for water "two fathoms deep" and thus just barely safe for navigation. Published in a New York periodical, The Saturday Press, in November 1865, the story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was an immediate hit when it was reprinted in newspapers far and wide. Written much in the manner of the Southwestern humour of the period of Clemens' youth, this fine tall tale brought not only his first national fame but also the first approval of his work by several discerning critics.

When, in 1866, the Pacific Steamboat Company inaugurated passenger service between San Francisco and Honolulu, Twain took the trip as a correspondent for The Sacramento Union. His letters and the lectures that he later gave about the trip were immediately popular. Since he enjoyed going places and talking about them, he set out again as "traveling correspondent" for California's largest paper, the Alta California; it was advertised that he would "circle the globe and write letters" as he went. The letters that he wrote during the next five months, for the Alta California and Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, caught the public fancy and, when revised for publication in 1869 as The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress, established Twain as a popular favourite. In his book Twain sharply satirized tourists who learned what they should see and feel by carefully reading guidebooks. He assumed the role of a keen-eyed, shrewd Westerner who was refreshingly honest and vivid in describing foreign scenes and his reactions to them. It is probable that Americans liked the implication that a common man could judge the Old World as well as the next man. But the chief attraction of the book was its humour, which readers of the time found delightful. The book showed that Mark Twain had found a method of writing about travel which, though seemingly artless, deftly employed changes of pace. Serious passages – history, statistics, description, explanation, argumentation – alternated with laughable ones. The humour itself was varied, sometimes being in the vein of the Southwestern yarn spinners whom he had encountered when a printer's devil, sometimes in that of contemporaneous humorists such as Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, who chiefly used burlesque and parody, anticlimactic sentences, puns, malapropisms, and other verbal devices. Thereafter he was to use the formula successfully in a number of books combining factual materials with humour.

In 1870 Twain resumed his career as a public lecturer who charmed audiences with laconic recitations of incredible comic incidents.

Twain continued to lecture with great success in the United States and, in 1872 and 1873, in England, holding audiences spellbound with his comic-coated satire, drawling cadences, and outlandish exaggerations. He recorded his experiences as a pilot in Old Times on the Mississippi for the Atlantic Monthly (1875), expanded eight years later to Life on the Mississippi, an authentic and compelling de­scription of a way of life that was, even then, long past. After ha­ving written boyhood friends, asking them to send their recollections of old days in Hannibal, he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, a narrative of youthful escapades that became an immediate and continuing favourite.

Tom Sawyer is perhaps Twain's best book for a juvenile audience. The setting was a small Mississippi River town, and the characters were the grownups and the children of the town in the 1830s. The book's nostalgic attitude and its wistful re-creation of pre-Civil War life is humorously spiced by its main character, Tom Sawyer. Rather than being the prematurely moral "model boy" of Sunday-school stories, Tom is depicted as "the normal boy," mischievous and irresponsible but goodhearted; and the book's subplots show him winning triumphs again and again. These happy endings endear the book to children, while the lifelike picture of a boy and his friends is enjoyed by both young and old.

Twain turned next to historical fiction. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) he transplants a commonsensical Yankee back in time to Britain during the Dark Ages. Through a series of wary adventures Twain celebrates American homespun ingenuity in contrast to the superstitious ineptitude of a chivalric monarchy.

The popular image of Mark Twain was by now well-established. He was a gruff but knowledgeable, unaffected man who had been places and seen things and was not fooled by pretense. He talked and wrote with contagious humanity and charm in the language of ordinary people. At the same time, he scornfully berated man; evolution failed, he said, when man appeared, for his was the only evil heart in the entire animal kingdom. Yet Mark Twain was one with those he scorned: what any man sees in the human race, he admitted, "is merely himself in the deep and private honesty of his own heart." Perceptive, comic, but also bitter, Twain seemed to be the mirror of all men.

History of English

When analyzing a word from the historical point of view students can try different approaches to the problem:

1. The origin of the word.

Intrigue

This word belongs to the group of later French borrowings of 17^th‑18^th centuries. As many words of this group it has retained a foreign appearance to the present day. The stress remains on the last syllable as in French. The word is pronounced with long [ i: ] indicated by the letter i like French words. It has a French spelling (the final letters – ue which are silent). All these facts prove that the word intrigue has not been completely assimilated in English.

2. Phonetic changes.

Child

The affricate [t∫] goes back to O.E. velar (plosive voiceless) [k] which was palatalised before a front vowel [i] to [k’].Toward the end of the O.E. period the palatal consonant developed to the affricate. In M.E. it was indicated by means of a special digraph ch which was introduced by French scribes.

The vowel [i] used to be a long vowel in O.E. (it was lengthened before the cluster ld in the 9^th century). In Early N.E. it became a diphthong [ai] due to the Great Vowel Shift.

The plural form of the word, children, has a short vowel in the root. The lengthening of [i] did not take place because the cluster ld was followed by another consonant.

3. Grammar phenomena.

Children

The plural form of the noun child has a non-standard ending - en. In O.E. the noun child (an s -stem, weak declension) took the ending – ru: cild – cildru. The ending of n -stems – en was added to the old forms of the plural in M.E. and later was preserved in N.E. As the ending - en was especially active in the southern dialects we can suppose that the form children might have come from this source.

4. Complex analyses.

In this type of the analyses students have to take into consideration various aspects of one and the same word (the origin of the word and its spelling, the origin of the word and phonetic changes, grammar phenomena and spelling etc). For example, the complex (and full) analyses of the word child comprises points 2 and 3 and also the information about the origin of this word (a native English word).

Here is the example of the complex analyses of the verb to give:

In O.E. this verb belonged to the group of strong verbs and formed its stems by means of vowel gradation (ablaut). Judging by the marker which followed the root vowel (a single consonant), the verb was included in class 5. The system of gradation of class 5 can be described as quantitative ablaut. The remains of it still can be clearly traced in the three forms of the verb: g i ve – g a ve – g i ven, which represent accordingly the infinitive and the present forms (i), the 3d person singular, past indicative (a) and the 2d participle (i), the former fourth form. At present the verb belongs to the group of irregular verbs.

Modern spelling and pronunciation of the verb can be traced back to ME. The letter v was introduced by the French scribes to denote the fricative voiced consonant [v] which in M.E. became a separate phoneme. The letter g which replaced O.E. з was introduced to denote the sound [g]. But here it should be mentioned that in O.E. the initial з was palatalised before a front vowel and later changed into [j] as in yard, young etc. The velar [g] of N.E. give could not result from phonetic development of palatal з. Its only source could be the Scandinavian variant. We may suppose that the word give was borrowed from the Northen dialect where O.E. and Scandinavian variants might blend. According to the textbooks the form give is found in late M.E., in the 15^th century.

The original ending of the infinitive was weakened in M.E. to [ə] which was lost in Late M.E. though it continued to be spelt as – e. This mute – e still can be seen at the end of the verb.

The word give belongs to the Germanic layer of the vocabulary and can be compared to the German verb geben. It is a native English word the phonetics of which was slightly influenced by the corresponding Scandinavian word.

Glossary

Old English, Middle English, New English, Early New English

Pre-written / prehistorical period

Loan-word (a French loan-word)

Borrowing (a borrowing from Latin)

To borrow a word

To adopt a word

To penetrate into English

International word

Productive

Conversion

Native root and borrowed affix

The prefix dis - with a negative meaning

The suffix - ess used to derive names of female beings

This word is characterised as a late borrowing by some peculiarities of pronunciation

A digraph

Double letters

To be respelt

To introduce sh to indicate the new sibilant

The two-fold use of c which has survived today owes its origin to French: this letter usually stood for [s] before front vowels and for [k] before back vowels

The spelling of the word changed under Scandinavian influence.

The spelling of the word was brought closer to its Latin source.

The sound [u:], which was represented by the letter u in O.E., came to be spelt ou, the way it was spelt in French.

Mute e

The letter e was preserved in words having a long root vowel

An -e appeared in words which had not had it in ME

Strong verbs

Vowel gradation / ablaut

Quantitative ablaut

Qualitative ablaut

Weak verbs

Dental suffix

Preterite-present verbs / past-present verbs

Anomalous verbs

Strong declension

Weak declension

Vocalic stems (a-stems)

Consonantal stems (n-stems)

Root stems

Gender

Number

Case

Pronouns (personal, demonstrative, possessive)

Consonants

Plosive voiceless [k]

Voiced [g’]

Fricative voiceless dental [f]

Fricative voiced dental [v]

Fricative mediolingual palatal [x’], [γ ’]

Fricative back lingual velar [x], [γ ’]

Affricate [t]

Palatalization

To be / become palatalized

The consonant is voiced intervocally and voiceless finally or initially

A positional variant of the phoneme

To become a separate phoneme

Consonant cluster / consonant sequence

[x] before t is lost and the preceding short vowel is lengthened

the digraph gh came to denote the consonant [f]

thus the word came to be pronounced [to:k]

in Early New English the clusters [sj, zj, tj, dj] changed into [∫], [з], [t∫], [dз] (sibilants changed into affricates)

to be simplified

the consonant [r] was vocalised finally and before consonants / vocalisation of r

sonorants

nasal sonorants were regularly lost before fricative consonants

West Germanic lengthening of consonants

The First Consonant Shift

Verner’ Law

Vowels

Levelling of the unstressed vowels

To be weakened and reduced to a neural vowel something like [ə]

To be lengthened

To be shortened

Open syllables

Closed syllables

Monophthong

Diphthong

Diphthongization

To develop into a diphthong

The Great Vowel Shift

Short vowels became long in open syllables

The vowel [ə] of unstressed endings was lost

[I:] has remained unchanged

[I:] took part in the vowel shift

The root-vowel interchange

I-umlaut/ palatal mutation/I-mutation

The vowel was fronted and made narrower

Grammar

Glossary

Grammatical structure

Synthetic and analytical languages

Analytical forms (Tense and Aspect verb-forms; the Passive Voice; the analytical form of the Subjunctive Mood)

Endings: tables, smoked, my brother’s book

Inner flexions: man-men, speak-spoke

Substitutes: one, that, do

Parts of speech – the notional parts of speech: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral, the verb, the adverb, the words of the category of state, the modal words, the interjection

The preposition, the conjunction, the particle, the article

Morphological characteristics: number, case, gender

Syntactical characteristics: the subject, object, attribute, predicative, prepositional indirect object, adverbial modifier

Morphological composition of nouns: simple, derivative and com­pound nouns

Productive noun-forming suffixes: reader, teacher, worker; dramatist, telegraphist; actress, hostess, heiress; madness, blackness, imperia­lism, nationalism

Unproductive suffixes: childhood, manhood freedom, friendship, development, importance, dependence, cruelty, generosity

Classification of nouns: proper nouns, common nouns, class nouns, nouns of material, collective nouns, abstract nouns

The definite, indefinite, zero article

Substantivized adjectives

Personal, possessive, reflexive, reciprocal, demonstrative, inter­roga­tive, relative, conjunctive, defining, indefinite, negative pronouns

The Verb

Grammatical categories: person, number, tense, aspect, voice and mood

Transitive and intransitive. The finite forms. The non-finite forms

Morphological structure: simple (read, live), derived (i.e. having affixes: magnify, captivate, undo), compound (i.e. consisting of two stems: daydream), composite (consisting of a verb and a postposition of adverbial origin: sit down, go away, give up)

The basic forms of the verb: the Infinitive, Past Indefinite,

Participle II.

Regular verbs, irregular verbs, mixed verbs

Syntactic function of verbs: notional, auxiliary, link verbs

Tenses: the Present Indefinite, the Past Indefinite, the Future Indefinite, the Present Continuous, the Past Continuous, the Future Continuous, the Future Continuous in the Past, the Present Perfect, the Past Perfect, the Future Perfect, the Future Perfect in the Past, the Present Perfect Continuous, the Past Perfect Continuous, the Future Perfect Continuous

The Passive Voice

Modal Verbs, modal expressions

Mood: the Indicative mood, the Imperative mood, the Subjunctive mood (Subjunctive I, Subjunctive II), the Suppositional mood

The Non-Finite Forms of the Verb (The Verbals): the Infinitive, the Participle I, II, the Gerund

The Predicative Constructions: Complex Object, Complex Subject – the Subjective, Objective Infinitive, Participial Constructions; the Nominative Absolute Participial Construction, the Prepositional Absolute Construction, Half Gerund

The Predicate: the simple predicate, the compound predicate (the compound nominal predicate, the compound verbal predicate (modal, aspect); the predicative (the objective predicative – They painted the door green)

The Compound Sentence

The Complex Sentence – a principal clause and one or more subordinate clauses: subject clauses, predicative clauses, object clauses, attributive clauses, adverbial clauses (of time, of cause, of purpose, of condition, of concession, of result, of manner, of com­parison), parenthetical clauses

The sequence of tenses

Indirect speech. Indirect questions

Punctuation: a comma, a full stop, period, a dash, brackets, colon, semicolon, inverted comas, exclamatory mark, question mark, quotation marks, dots

Homogeneous members

VOWELS

I. Monophthongs

1) According to the front-back position of the tongue (horizontal movement):

a) front: [i], [i:], [e], [æ];

b) central: [ə], [ə:];

c) back: [u], [u:], [/\], [o], [o:], [a:].

2) According to the height of the body of the tongue (vertical movement):

a) high / close: [i], [i:], [u], [u:];

b) mid: [e], [ə], [ə:];

c) low/ open: [a:], [æ], [/\], [o], [o:].

3) According to the position of the lips / degree of lip rounding:

a) rounded / labialized: [u], [u:], [o], [o:];

b) unrounded: [i], [i:], [e], [æ], [ə], [ə:], [/\], [a:].

4) According to the length/ duration:

a) short: [i], [e], [æ], [ə], [u], [/\], [o];

b) long: [i:], [ə:], [u:], [o:], [a:].

5) According to the tenseness of the vocal organs:

a) tense: all long vowels;

b) lax: all short vowels.

6) According to the position of soft palate:

a) nasal (before a nasal consonant, allophonic change);

b) oral (in other positions).

7) According to the e